Monday, May 07, 2018

The Library of My Childhood

I was in the library a few weeks ago and picked up a flyer advertising a writing competition being run by Devon Libraries in connection with this year's Tavistock Festival. I am a loyal supporter of the library and would be all at sea without it; reserving books online, borrowing, accessing the research facilities, using the photocopier for my Tithe Map projects ...I'm always in there, as well as donating a share of my surplus new books to them, this on the basis that I can always borrow them back if I need to. And though I'm not involved with the festival at all. Arthur Ransome has been one of their event topics this year and the theme for the competition was 'Recapturing Childhood'. I can do that I thought, having never entered anything like this before, but nothing ventured etc I duly wrote my 1500 words and submitted them, along with my £5 entry fee, for what would be an anonymous judging process. Imagine how delighted I was to hear that I had been awarded joint first prize. £30 along with a book donated and inscribed by The Arthur Ransome Society, and all presented by local creative writing teacher Myfanwy (Vanni) Cook at a ceremony at the Festival gala evening on Saturday.

Now I have to decide which books to buy, because special books it will surely be (all suggestions welcome) but in the meantime, a slightly longer blog post than usual today with my entry on here for the record. I've put a few names back in but had left them out of the original entry as per the anonymity requirement.

The Library of My Childhood

Dear Mr Chester,

I am writing to let you know that if your daughter tells you that we are not allowing her to read books at school it is because we feel she is reading too much.

She has read the contents of the school library as well as working her way through the entire reading scheme that we have available. If she continues to read at this pace we fear she will become an empty shell, full of books and little of the realities of life.

Kind regards

Miss Horsburgh

Headmistress.

Whenever I set foot in Tavistock Library, for a very brief moment (and it happens every time) I am not a sixty-four-year old supposed-to-be-grown-up, but eight years old again and walking into Mitcham Library on a Saturday morning with my Dad.

My Dad had left school at the age of 14 in 1939 when war broke out and entered active war service immediately. It was an education of a different sort that didn’t involve books, and he would spend the rest of his life reading and teaching himself as if to make up for it. By the 1950s he worked as a chemical engineer at a place we called ‘The Works.’ In fact it was a very smelly factory producing vast amounts of noxious substances in the very early days of the invention of PVC . He worked long hours on day and night shift for a very small salary; just enough to keep a post-war working class family of four, with a mortgage and parents with huge ambitions for their children’s education, afloat.

My brother was two years older than me and we would benefit from a Grammar School education thanks in no small part to the library. We were both avid readers but Saturday mornings at the library, whilst my brother went to football practice, were sacrosanct for my Dad and me. A together-time when we would walk across Mitcham and shop our way up to the library. Into Coombs Bakery where the shop assistant had a droopy bottom lip that we would both secretly and naughtily mimic (for the next fifty years or so wherever we were) once we’d been in and bought a Large Bloomer and walked up the road a bit. We’d already walked past Gresham Motors to look at the minute hole in the shop window where a stone had once flicked up from a passing bus, missing my Dad’s head by a fraction and leaving a hole in the glass instead. Maybe we’d stopped and put a penny in the slot in the window of the toy shop to wake up the model railway and send the train on a circuit. I’d have had a look and coveted this new invention called a Felt Pen in the window of Deseret Enterprises, an office-equipment supplier. Having lived in hope of an Etch-a Sketch I would eventually get a felt pen, just the one, for Christmas and it was my most treasured possession. We’d stop off at the Building Society to pay the mortgage each week in cash and then we’d get to the library. To walk any further we’d have ended up at Mr Yee Chong’s Dental Surgery at Renshaw Corner. I spent enough time in there with my ‘Child of the 1950s’ teeth, much better to head into the library.

In my memory Mitcham Library was a grand old building, but maybe I’m mixing it up with Wallington were we moved to when I was eleven, but still kept up our Saturday morning tradition. My Dad would peel off into the Adult section whilst I would head into the Children’s section clutching last Saturday’s books, which I had often read by the Sunday evening, in readiness for more books waiting for me at school on the Monday. You see for a child of the 1950s, where money was scarce, to be bought books was a rare treat. You had to rely on finding them where you could… the library and school.

On this particular Saturday my Dad came in to my domain with me.

I’m not sure I thought too much of it at the time, I’d done my usual of heading straight to the Enid Blyton shelf to see what was up for grabs before anyone else could up and grab it. I watched as he had a word with the librarian before giving me a quick wink and heading off into the serious adult side, where men sat in armchairs reading huge newspapers on great long sticks. I never could figure it out, why couldn’t they just hold and fold like everyone else.

I took my books for return to the raised counter. It was like a dais, a throne even, in the centre of the room. The librarian was queen of all she surveyed and oh my, she was lucky enough to use that magical date stamp ‘thing’. As if that wasn’t enough she had all these rows and rows of cards in neat boxes in front of her and she would know exactly where to look to find the tickets for my books. It was all alchemy and magic to an eight year old, forget being a nurse, which was my mother’s ambition for me, I wanted to be a librarian and use that stamp, and flick through those tickets with authority whilst looking down on children over my glasses. I also wanted to walk round with the pile of books creeping up one arm whilst efficiently re-shelving them with the other hand, putting them back in exactly the right place. I felt sure the mysterious numbers would mean something to me one day. I would also be the one to ask, because all library books said this… ‘Please inform the Librarian if you have had an infectious disease,’ yes, I would be the one to ask about measles, chickenpox or mumps. I never did find out what happened to the books if the answer came in the affirmative, but whatever it was I would have sorted it and sympathised with the victim, from my position on the dais.

On this particular day I handed my books back as usual. My four dog-eared orange cardboard tickets were returned to me and then something else happened. The librarian handed me four more. Four brand new tickets?

‘Your Dad has had a word with me and we’re going to let you take eight books a week out now instead of four.’

I had absolutely no idea what lay behind this benevolence, but I wasn’t about to look this particular bookish gift horse in the mouth. I could hardly believe my luck and was torn between rushing in to tell my dad my good fortune and the realisation that I would no longer have to whittle my choices down to four. I now had the luxury of eight books. I could have all the Malory Towers books in one go if I wanted; a whole heap of Famous Five; every Malcolm Savile book I could lay my hands on. This was bliss of the highest order.

I would be about twenty before my parents told me about The Letter and the first thing I remember asking was ‘Well, why on earth didn’t you complain to the school?’

But this was the 1950s. Both my parents had missed out on their education because of the war. They were working class, something about knowing their place and not having the confidence to take on a fearsome cane-wielding head teacher who, by my Dad’s admission, frightened him far more than being bombed by the Germans whilst sailing on the Arctic Convoys, or invading Sicily. With education comes confidence and self-esteem and my parents were utterly determined that my brother and I would have all three. To that end, in their eyes, I needed to be allowed to read…as much as I wanted, whenever I wanted.

I did get to ‘work’ in the library in the end which got it out of my system and I would become a nurse. They ran a scheme for children where you could volunteer for a shift on a Saturday morning, working alongside the librarian, standing on the dais, doing the date stamp (what utter joy), unlocking the mysteries of the filed tickets and the Dewey Decimal System. I became quite proficient at the re-shelving from the armful of books. I suspect it was more about giving the librarians a bit of a break, because in the end they trusted us to run the place and went off for extended lunch hours leaving the children of the borough in charge.

‘Have you had chickenpox?’

‘Are you looking for anything in particular today?’

I don’t know if anyone else was rewarded with eight tickets, but I treasured mine and I still treasure the library for all the memories it brings to mind, ever so briefly, each and every time I walk in the door.

Comments

The Library of My Childhood

I was in the library a few weeks ago and picked up a flyer advertising a writing competition being run by Devon Libraries in connection with this year's Tavistock Festival. I am a loyal supporter of the library and would be all at sea without it; reserving books online, borrowing, accessing the research facilities, using the photocopier for my Tithe Map projects ...I'm always in there, as well as donating a share of my surplus new books to them, this on the basis that I can always borrow them back if I need to. And though I'm not involved with the festival at all. Arthur Ransome has been one of their event topics this year and the theme for the competition was 'Recapturing Childhood'. I can do that I thought, having never entered anything like this before, but nothing ventured etc I duly wrote my 1500 words and submitted them, along with my £5 entry fee, for what would be an anonymous judging process. Imagine how delighted I was to hear that I had been awarded joint first prize. £30 along with a book donated and inscribed by The Arthur Ransome Society, and all presented by local creative writing teacher Myfanwy (Vanni) Cook at a ceremony at the Festival gala evening on Saturday.

Now I have to decide which books to buy, because special books it will surely be (all suggestions welcome) but in the meantime, a slightly longer blog post than usual today with my entry on here for the record. I've put a few names back in but had left them out of the original entry as per the anonymity requirement.

The Library of My Childhood

Dear Mr Chester,

I am writing to let you know that if your daughter tells you that we are not allowing her to read books at school it is because we feel she is reading too much.

She has read the contents of the school library as well as working her way through the entire reading scheme that we have available. If she continues to read at this pace we fear she will become an empty shell, full of books and little of the realities of life.

Kind regards

Miss Horsburgh

Headmistress.

Whenever I set foot in Tavistock Library, for a very brief moment (and it happens every time) I am not a sixty-four-year old supposed-to-be-grown-up, but eight years old again and walking into Mitcham Library on a Saturday morning with my Dad.

My Dad had left school at the age of 14 in 1939 when war broke out and entered active war service immediately. It was an education of a different sort that didn’t involve books, and he would spend the rest of his life reading and teaching himself as if to make up for it. By the 1950s he worked as a chemical engineer at a place we called ‘The Works.’ In fact it was a very smelly factory producing vast amounts of noxious substances in the very early days of the invention of PVC . He worked long hours on day and night shift for a very small salary; just enough to keep a post-war working class family of four, with a mortgage and parents with huge ambitions for their children’s education, afloat.

My brother was two years older than me and we would benefit from a Grammar School education thanks in no small part to the library. We were both avid readers but Saturday mornings at the library, whilst my brother went to football practice, were sacrosanct for my Dad and me. A together-time when we would walk across Mitcham and shop our way up to the library. Into Coombs Bakery where the shop assistant had a droopy bottom lip that we would both secretly and naughtily mimic (for the next fifty years or so wherever we were) once we’d been in and bought a Large Bloomer and walked up the road a bit. We’d already walked past Gresham Motors to look at the minute hole in the shop window where a stone had once flicked up from a passing bus, missing my Dad’s head by a fraction and leaving a hole in the glass instead. Maybe we’d stopped and put a penny in the slot in the window of the toy shop to wake up the model railway and send the train on a circuit. I’d have had a look and coveted this new invention called a Felt Pen in the window of Deseret Enterprises, an office-equipment supplier. Having lived in hope of an Etch-a Sketch I would eventually get a felt pen, just the one, for Christmas and it was my most treasured possession. We’d stop off at the Building Society to pay the mortgage each week in cash and then we’d get to the library. To walk any further we’d have ended up at Mr Yee Chong’s Dental Surgery at Renshaw Corner. I spent enough time in there with my ‘Child of the 1950s’ teeth, much better to head into the library.

In my memory Mitcham Library was a grand old building, but maybe I’m mixing it up with Wallington were we moved to when I was eleven, but still kept up our Saturday morning tradition. My Dad would peel off into the Adult section whilst I would head into the Children’s section clutching last Saturday’s books, which I had often read by the Sunday evening, in readiness for more books waiting for me at school on the Monday. You see for a child of the 1950s, where money was scarce, to be bought books was a rare treat. You had to rely on finding them where you could… the library and school.

On this particular Saturday my Dad came in to my domain with me.

I’m not sure I thought too much of it at the time, I’d done my usual of heading straight to the Enid Blyton shelf to see what was up for grabs before anyone else could up and grab it. I watched as he had a word with the librarian before giving me a quick wink and heading off into the serious adult side, where men sat in armchairs reading huge newspapers on great long sticks. I never could figure it out, why couldn’t they just hold and fold like everyone else.

I took my books for return to the raised counter. It was like a dais, a throne even, in the centre of the room. The librarian was queen of all she surveyed and oh my, she was lucky enough to use that magical date stamp ‘thing’. As if that wasn’t enough she had all these rows and rows of cards in neat boxes in front of her and she would know exactly where to look to find the tickets for my books. It was all alchemy and magic to an eight year old, forget being a nurse, which was my mother’s ambition for me, I wanted to be a librarian and use that stamp, and flick through those tickets with authority whilst looking down on children over my glasses. I also wanted to walk round with the pile of books creeping up one arm whilst efficiently re-shelving them with the other hand, putting them back in exactly the right place. I felt sure the mysterious numbers would mean something to me one day. I would also be the one to ask, because all library books said this… ‘Please inform the Librarian if you have had an infectious disease,’ yes, I would be the one to ask about measles, chickenpox or mumps. I never did find out what happened to the books if the answer came in the affirmative, but whatever it was I would have sorted it and sympathised with the victim, from my position on the dais.

On this particular day I handed my books back as usual. My four dog-eared orange cardboard tickets were returned to me and then something else happened. The librarian handed me four more. Four brand new tickets?

‘Your Dad has had a word with me and we’re going to let you take eight books a week out now instead of four.’

I had absolutely no idea what lay behind this benevolence, but I wasn’t about to look this particular bookish gift horse in the mouth. I could hardly believe my luck and was torn between rushing in to tell my dad my good fortune and the realisation that I would no longer have to whittle my choices down to four. I now had the luxury of eight books. I could have all the Malory Towers books in one go if I wanted; a whole heap of Famous Five; every Malcolm Savile book I could lay my hands on. This was bliss of the highest order.

I would be about twenty before my parents told me about The Letter and the first thing I remember asking was ‘Well, why on earth didn’t you complain to the school?’

But this was the 1950s. Both my parents had missed out on their education because of the war. They were working class, something about knowing their place and not having the confidence to take on a fearsome cane-wielding head teacher who, by my Dad’s admission, frightened him far more than being bombed by the Germans whilst sailing on the Arctic Convoys, or invading Sicily. With education comes confidence and self-esteem and my parents were utterly determined that my brother and I would have all three. To that end, in their eyes, I needed to be allowed to read…as much as I wanted, whenever I wanted.

I did get to ‘work’ in the library in the end which got it out of my system and I would become a nurse. They ran a scheme for children where you could volunteer for a shift on a Saturday morning, working alongside the librarian, standing on the dais, doing the date stamp (what utter joy), unlocking the mysteries of the filed tickets and the Dewey Decimal System. I became quite proficient at the re-shelving from the armful of books. I suspect it was more about giving the librarians a bit of a break, because in the end they trusted us to run the place and went off for extended lunch hours leaving the children of the borough in charge.

‘Have you had chickenpox?’

‘Are you looking for anything in particular today?’

I don’t know if anyone else was rewarded with eight tickets, but I treasured mine and I still treasure the library for all the memories it brings to mind, ever so briefly, each and every time I walk in the door.

Constants...

Team Tolstoy

Team TolstoyA year-long shared read of War & Peace through the centenary year of Count Lyev Nikolayevich Tolstoy's death, starting on his birthday, September 9th 2010.
Everyone is welcome to board the troika and read along, meeting here on the 9th of every month to chat in comments about the book.

Team Tolstoy BookmarkDon't know your Bolkonskys from your Rostovs?
An aide memoire that can be niftily printed and laminated into a double-sided bookmark.

Port Eliot Festival

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